Candidate: The candidate has clinical expertise in neurogenic communication disorders and interdisciplinary training in cognitive science, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, experimental design, and statistics. She became assistant professor of neurogenic communication disorders at Ohio University (OU) two years ago in order to focus her career efforts on clinical research. Environment: OU's School of Hearing and Speech Sciences offers one of the largest training programs in communication sciences and disorders in the US, and has an active doctoral program. Numerous sources of research support for the research and training programs proposed are offered at OU and at the institutions of the candidate's proposed mentors. Her primary goals to be facilitated by the MCDSA are: (a) to make a significant contribution, with increased independence, to clinically applicable research on neurogenic communication disorders; and (b) to enhance her role as an educator in the neuroscience of communication. Research: The distinction of competence from performance issues is often problematic in the process of differential diagnosis of communication deficits in neurologically impaired patients. A majority of patients who present with aphasia also present with motoric and/or perceptual deficits that may impair their ability to respond, or to respond correctly, when traditional tests of linguistic comprehension are administered. Linguistic comprehension deficits in many patients may be frequently overestimated by test results and clinical judgment. A series of studies focused on methodological developments for studying comprehension deficits in aphasic patients, using spontaneous eye movement responses, is proposed. Advantages of the proposed methodology include: provision of information about intact comprehension ability that is currently unavailable for many severely inexpressive patients; allowance for stimulus adaptations that may serve to control for perceptual, attentional, and oculomotor deficits in the differential diagnosis of verbal comprehension difficulties; the reduction of reliance on patients' understanding of verbal instructions prior to testing; allowance for a real-time measure of comprehension; and allowance for testing of a broad range of verbal stimulus types.